Explication of Threat in the Bilingual Worldview of Belarusians: An Experimental Study

The study presents the results of a comparative study of the characteristics of the perception of verbal manifestations of a threat as an unlawful act in the aspects of its explication in the bilingual worldview of Belarusians. Additionally, the features of everyday and scientific (linguo-legal) understanding of speech statements containing signs of threat were subjected to comparative analysis. The study reflects issues related to the understanding of the category “picture of the world” from the perspective of the theory of bilingualism and modern legal linguistics, the phenomenon of threat as a criminal offense committed verbally. The practical part of the work was implemented in the form of an experimental survey, in which two groups of 70 people of natural bilinguals took part, who completed a task in Belarusian or Russian: select one or more statements from the proposed list, which, in their opinion, can be legally interpreted as a threat. The results of the experimental study showed the presence of discrepancies in the verbalization of the threat depending on the language code used: in the group that worked with Belarusian-language material, the absolute number of respondents who chose the statement “I will adjudicate and exterminate my justice - execution!” in one or another combination of answers was 41 people (58.6 %). Among respondents who completed the task in Russian, this figure is 31.7 % (26 people), which is lower, even taking into account the possible error. An analysis of all the respondents’ answers allowed us to conclude that in the everyday picture of the world of Belarusians, the explication of a threat often does not require an indication of the addresser, as well as an identifiable type of potential harm.